The City of Cape Coral put out a short notice on October 30 that did not get much attention and probably should have. Customer Billing Services, working with the city's Information Technology department, has started sending automated notifications to utility customers whose meters show continuous water consumption. In the week of the announcement, the system generated notifications for more than 2,000 locations.
That is the city's own number, from its own announcement page. More than two thousand addresses, in one week, where the meter never stopped turning.
I rent water slides for a living, so a few people have already asked me the obvious question in two different directions. One version is nervous: if I run a hose into a slide all afternoon, is the city going to call me? The other version is annoyed: I got one of these calls and the only unusual thing I did that month was throw my kid a birthday party, so is that what set it off?
The answers are no and almost certainly not, and the reason why is worth understanding, because it also tells you something useful about your own plumbing.
Continuous is the operative word
The program is not looking for high water use. It is looking for uninterrupted water use. The city lists the usual culprits in its notice: a running toilet, a dripping faucet, an irrigation system that is not shutting off, and other plumbing issues. Those have one thing in common. They do not stop. A flapper valve that will not seat runs at three in the morning and at three in the afternoon and every hour in between, which produces a meter reading with no zeroes in it anywhere.
That is a signature a billing system can spot without knowing anything about your house. It does not need a threshold on volume. It needs a stretch of hours where consumption never drops to nothing.
A party does the opposite. The hose comes on at eleven, gets throttled back for cake, goes off while the kids eat, comes back on, and is off entirely by five. Even on the heaviest afternoon, the meter shows a shape — a block of use with clear edges on both sides and nothing overnight. One Saturday of that does not look remotely like a leak, and it should not generate a call.
There is one way a rental day can actually trip the thing, and it has nothing to do with the slide. It is the spigot nobody closed. If a hose bib gets left cracked open after teardown and trickles all night into the grass, that is a textbook continuous-consumption event, and it is also the single most common way a homeowner loses real money on a party. My boys and I walk the hose bib on the way out for exactly this reason. It takes four seconds and it is the only part of teardown I check twice.
What the hose actually costs you now
Here is where the news item gets practical, because the city's rate schedule also changed on October 1, 2026, and the new numbers are steeper than most people's mental model.
From the current published rate schedule, for a residential customer on a 5/8-inch meter:
- Water capacity charge: $25.36 per month, fixed
- Wastewater capacity charge: $32.83 per month, fixed
- Water, first 5,000 gallons: $5.44 per thousand
- Water, 5,001 to 10,000: $8.14 per thousand
- Water, 10,001 to 15,000: $10.86 per thousand
- Water, 15,001 to 20,000: $14.92 per thousand
- Water, above 20,000: $19.00 per thousand
- Wastewater disposal commodity: $12.85 per thousand, not tiered
- Irrigation, single-family and duplex: $13.40 per month, flat
Spend thirty seconds on the shape of that list and you can see why the average-cost number everybody quotes is the wrong number. The two capacity charges are fixed. They do not move whether you fill a slide or leave town for the month. The water commodity charge is tiered and marginal, which means the gallons you add at the end of the month are billed at the rate of the tier you are standing in when you add them — not at your blended average.
This is the distinction I spend a good part of my CFO life dragging people back to. Average cost tells you what happened. Marginal cost tells you what a decision costs. They are different numbers, and for a tiered utility they can be different by a factor of three.
Run it with real figures. In my June notes on the 30-foot slip and slide I put a realistic afternoon at 1,200 to 1,800 gallons with the hose throttled between rides. Call it 1,500.
Household A is a modest user and lands around 5,500 gallons in a normal month. Add 1,500 and all of it falls inside the $8.14 tier: $12.21 on the water side.
Household B irrigates off the potable line or tops off a pool and runs 14,000 gallons. Add the same 1,500 and the first thousand bills at $10.86 while the next five hundred crosses into the $14.92 tier: $18.32. Same hose. Same slide. Same kids. Fifty percent more on the bill, purely because of where that household was already sitting.
Then there is the wastewater half, which is the part I cannot answer for you honestly. The published schedule lists the disposal commodity charge at $12.85 per thousand gallons and states no cap, and it does not explain how residential wastewater volume gets determined. If your wastewater gallons are simply read off your water meter, then 1,500 gallons that soaked into your St. Augustine and never saw a drain would still carry roughly $19.28 of sewer charge, which would more than double the cost of the afternoon. If there is a residential cap or an adjustment, it would not. That is a real question with a real dollar answer and it is not in the document, so the only correct move is to ask. Customer Billing Services takes that call at 239-574-7722.
I would rather tell you to make a phone call than hand you a number I guessed at.
The irrigation bill is a different bill, and the slide is not on it
One more thing the rate sheet makes clear, and it clears up a question I get constantly. A single-family Cape Coral home pays a flat $13.40 a month for irrigation service. Flat. Not metered, not per thousand gallons.
That is a tempting line to look at and conclude the water for a slide is effectively free if you can reach it off an irrigation valve. Do not do that. Irrigation here is reuse water and it is not treated for human contact, and children on a slide swallow water — that is not a risk, it is a certainty. Our units hook to the potable hose bib and nothing else. If the only water source within reach of where you want the slide is an irrigation valve, the slide goes somewhere else or we run more hose. I have never made an exception to that and I am not going to.
The flat rate does explain something useful, though. If your usage and your bill both jumped and you are trying to figure out which system did it, the irrigation half of your statement cannot be the answer. It is the same every month. The movement is on the potable side.
If you already got the call
Take it seriously, including and especially if you had a party that month. The temptation is to file the notice under “oh, that was the birthday thing” and move on, and that is exactly how a running toilet bills you for six months. A one-day party and a continuous leak produce completely different meter patterns, and the city's system is built to find the second one. If it called you, something in the house was probably running when nobody was home.
The city's notice says customers can call Customer Billing Services for troubleshooting, check the Utilities and Bill Payment FAQs, and that the city may send a Field Service Representative out to check continuous consumption at the meter. All of that is free to ask about and considerably cheaper than a quarter of wasted water.
The fastest do-it-yourself check costs nothing: shut off every fixture in the house, go out to the meter box at the front of the lot, and watch the small leak-detection dial. If it is moving with everything inside turned off, you have a leak somewhere between the meter and the house. If it is still, the problem is a fixture that only runs intermittently, and the toilets are where to start.
What this does not change about booking a slide
Nothing, honestly. Our water slide rentals are priced by the day — the 30-foot slip and slide at $349, the 15-foot Blue Wave Double Splash at $399, the 22-foot Tropical Hurricane at $449, each with delivery, setup and teardown included in Cape Coral. Against those numbers, twelve to thirty dollars of water is a rounding error, and I have never had a customer cancel over it.
What the city's new alert program should change is how seriously you treat an unexplained jump in your own usage. Two thousand notifications in a week is not a glitch. That is a lot of houses quietly losing water in a town that spent two years with a shortage order hanging over part of its northeast side, which I wrote about in August when the watering schedule came up.
If you are thinking about a slide for a November party and you want to walk through the hose side of it before you book — where the spigot is, how far it has to reach, whether the yard drains where you want the splash to land — call or text me at (239) 212-0011 and we will go through it. It is a five-minute conversation and it occasionally saves a customer from putting a slide somewhere it was going to flood.
About the author
Gabriel Denny — Owner, SWFL Amusements LLC
Gabe owns SWFL Amusements. He spent 20+ years in the Air Force, first enlisting after high school before commissioning and retiring as a Major. He is a 5x CFO, which he continues to do when not working bounce houses. He lives in NW Cape Coral, runs events with his two sons, and answers the company phone himself, including at 2am.